10.10.23-Showcase-Seoul-3D_Architect

KAI NARITA: Good afternoon, everyone. It's a great honor to be here to present our startup, 3D ArchiTech. We are located in Boston, Massachusetts, in the US. We are a metal 3D printing startup. My name is Kai Narita. I'm a co-founder and CEO of the 3D ArchiTech. I'm also a visiting scientist at MIT, and my company here, the 3D ArchiTech, is selected for START.nano program, which is one of the accelerator programs organized by MIT.nano, the research facility at MIT.

So as a metal 3D printing startup, or even a metal manufacturing startup, we envision that we revolutionize metal manufacturing platform to realize the imagination with a complete freedom of materials, architectures, and production volumes. Behind this vision, we see the two fundamental problems in the metal manufacturing space.

The first problem we see is the manufacturable resolution-- how fine you can make the metal devices. So the performance efficiency and also performance efficiency of the metal devices, such as this heatsink, are locked by the limited micron-scale control today. And the material selections that can achieve such a small micron-scale control.

So here, the heatsinks is made by currently CNC Machining or extrusion process, which you can reach only 100-micrometer-thick fins, which if we could make it smaller, it could improve the surface area and the cooling performance. However, we reach the already how fine we can make the metal devices by the current manufacturing process.

The other problem we see is the tradeoff between particles and production volume. The traditional and established manufacturing process is metal injection molding. That's a really good example. We need $50,000 to $100,000 to make a mold, which means to make one design. So we always need to make more to reduce our particles.

Metal 3D printers have emerged around 2015, and people are really excited about this technology because finally we thought we could do on-demand production. But that wasn't really the case. The reason is that metal 3D printing is also expensive. Usually, it costs around $1 million. The most affordable one still costs $100,000. So we need to make a lot to reduce the particles in the metal manufacturing.

So to tackle these two challenges in metal manufacturing space, we invented a completely new technology of metal 3D printing, which is the gel-based metal 3D printing. We don't use any metal powder or metal wire as a starting material. We use gel, which doesn't contain metals at all. So by using our proprietary gel materials, we can use the commercially available, if you like-- basically printers, to create 3D structural gel, which has a form factor of the final product.

And then we have the commercial-- I'm sorry. You have the proprietary chemistry which can convert from gel to metal so that by using this commercially available UV light-based printer which is usually used for the making plastic, we can make the 3D structured metals. So by using this technology, we can offer 10-micrometer feature size, which is 10 times smaller than any other metal 3D printers can offer.

We also can offer the versatile metal selections, including pure copper or tungsten, which is very hard to be made by other metal 3D printing technologies. This type of 3D print is very affordable. Usually, it costs around $1,000 per printer. So this is 100 times lower equipment cost. And this allows us to do low-part cost, even from one piece of production.

And here's what we can make. If you are interested in seeing these prototypes, please come to my booth today. So in the next side, we have the silver structure with a 40-micrometer features, which is a half size of the human hair thickness. And with this feature size, we can make more than three centimeters on the size of the copper lattice sheet, which is used for the heatsink applications.

We can make alloys, which is a different combination of the metals-- copper-nickel, or for elemental alloys, or tungsten-nickel alloys. So you have the huge versatility of the material selections.

So by taking advantage of this technology and the very fine feature products, we are working on currently the application development with corporate partners in various industries-- heatsink market, hydrogen production, electrical motors, and jewelry market.

Today, I'd like to give you one example of a heatsink application, especially for the data center cooling. So the heat is a huge problem in the data center. Thermal design power, which represents how much heat is generated per CPU or GPU, has nearly doubled recently and also increased more. So we need a new cooling solution to cool down data center server.

And also, if you look into the energy consumption in the data center, the 40% of the consumption comes from the cooling. So we need a new cooling solution with a more energy-efficient heatsink.

So we are working on the new liquid-cooling heatsink applications with heatsink design companies. So traditionally, it's made by CNC Machining, which provides 100-micrometer feature size. But by using our technology, we can offer a topologically optimized structure with 10-micrometer features, which provides more than four times energy-efficient cooling performance with a competitive price point at $20 per unit, compared to $50 per unit by CNC Machining process.

It's supposed to be like the market penetration in Korea, but I'm just going to skip this slide.

Great. So today, the example of the heatsink is one of the applications-- one of the examples. So today, I'm looking for the description, or the partnership, for the PoCs for the heatsink applications, water electrolyzer/fuel cells, batteries, and electronics, and MEMS application.

We are also trying to scale up this manufacturing process. So if you're interested in partnership with 3D printing, or if you're interested in the partnership of the manufacturing of this technology, and if you are 3D printing [INAUDIBLE], or 3D printing manufacturers, please come to me. I can show you some prototypes and still talk about more in depth of the discussion here.

Thank you so much, and I look forward to talking with you guys.

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